For a professional skateboarder, especially for one who’s been around the block a few times, the stability of their chosen profession has to be something that causes as much anxiety as a blind roll-up to some random double-set: How big is this deal? Are things going to go according to plan? What’s going to happen next?
Faced with these thoughts, much of our community defensively barks that skateboarding isn’t about a paycheck, it isn’t about contracts, it isn’t about what an individual can squeeze out of their sponsors, or even how many sponsors they can accumulate. It’s about riding a skateboard, purely and basically.
Love it or leave it, bitches.
Freddy DeSota elevates possibilities. Vari high in Boulder. Photo: Lance Mountain
But with each passing advertisement featuring our famed, brave heroes, with each new video release spotlighting who’s hot, and with each tour calendar page torn away, never to be considered again, time is passing us by. Pretty soon, those we’ve counted on to show us the upper elevations of what’s possible on a skateboard, who’ve lent their names to the bottoms of decks and the tongues of shoes, who’ve laid their stylistic touch to everything from clothes to crooks, will burn out, fade away, and only be left with what they were able to collect during their short tenures as our throwaway idols.
For a couple handfuls of the lucky ones, the lottery has played in their favor, and they stand as battered examples of what can happen if your number comes up. But these chosen few also serve as evidence for the haters that all pros have it made—cribs, cars, and currency.
It’s a sad state of affairs.
No signs or dividing lines. Leo Baker flicks one with the weight of gold. Photo: Sam McGuire
What was once shrugged off as evolution—the discarding of freestylers or the ignoring of vertical specialists, for example—is now a looming reality for today’s paycheck dependent pro. Soon, for whatever reason, skateboarding will move on and the very comrades we coddle, love, and worship today—the icons we hold to a ridiculously high standard—will be out on their asses tomorrow.
No matter who they are, that doesn’t seem cool.
There is no veterans’ minimum in skateboarding. There is no security. Hell, there’s barely even health care. Why? Who knows? Maybe it’s because for all the years that there’s actually been professionals, skateboarding has been an individual activity—everyone for themselves. And while that individualism is the very cornerstone on which skateboarding has been built—along with originality, freedom, and style—it’s also one of the weak spots in our childish foundations.
Hobie Cat, Eddie Elguera, takes things into his own hands. Photo: Glen E. Freidman
In the not so distant past, the thing that set the individual pro apart was a board with their name on it. Then that became as easy as pulling a squeegee over a screen and the standard for professional legitimacy became discounted. For the past couple decades or so, the signature shoe and the collateral refuge that came along with it was the pinnacle of professionalism. But even now, footwear fame has become too easy to attach to a skater—a desperate attempt to legitimize a product instead of a level of professional skating that goes with it.
Skateboarders have begun to take care of themselves on some levels, sure, by starting companies, investing in things outside skateboarding, even endorsing things that have nothing to do with riding a skateboard. But at end of the day, if a pro hasn’t taken matters into their own hands, and set themselves up with more than a paycheck and travel reimbursement, the only thing they’re going to have when all’s said and done is a memory or two. Oh, and bad ankles, knees, wrists, and shoulders.
Where are we going with this? Possibly nowhere—and that’s really no place to be. If we don’t start to take care of our own, skateboarding is at risk of spinning out, sputtering, and choking on it’s own fumes.
Rob Collinson jumps toward skateboarding’s future from back in its card-carrying past. Photo: Brian Gaberman
From time to time, skateboarding and all its factions—from the company owner to the shop employee, from the confident pro to the hopeful amateur, from the old to the young—might do well to see itself as a single entity. A whole that’s healthier than the sum of its parts. And in looking past the next year or decade or lifetime, we should think about how we treat our champions and leaders. Do we set them up for showing us our would-be greatness and potential or do we set them up just so we can knock them down? Because it seems to me, the respect we show to these shining examples is a direct reflection of the respect we have for skateboarding overall.
And skateboarding really needs that respect … deserves it. Not from anyone else, but from its own purveyors—and that respect needs to be guided, secure, and way more than proper.
Without it we’d be without it.
Listen to Lowcard Mag’s Solo Drive Playlist.
